


Speaking Into Reality

by wowbright



Series: Klaine One-Shots [6]
Category: Glee
Genre: Advent Challenge 2013, Angst, Assault, Blood, Drowning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-02
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-03-20 21:59:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3666747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wowbright/pseuds/wowbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Klaine Advent Day 16 prompt “<a href="http://klaineadvent.tumblr.com/post/70282568183"><em>pulse</em></a><em>.” I’ve often seen people wishing canon!Blaine would talk in more detail about getting beat up at that first Sadie Hawkins dance. This story is about why he might not want to. Thanks to <a href="http://nachochang.tumblr.com">nachochang</a> for betaing.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Speaking Into Reality

> “At my old school there was a Sadie Hawkins dance, and I had just come out. So I asked a friend of mine – the only other gay guy in the school. While we were waiting for his dad to pick us up, these three guys, um, beat the living crap out of us.” – Blaine Anderson, “[Prom Queen,” 2.20](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUEBQHPRSLY)

_* * *_

**Speaking Into Reality**

There's a reason Blaine went seven months between meeting Kurt and mentioning what happened at the Sadie Hawkins dance, despite having plenty of opportunities to bring it up.

He might have said something that first afternoon he met Kurt, offered it as a point of sympathy when Kurt told him about the Neanderthal who was making his life a living hell.

He could have explained that day at Dalton when the custodian decided that the urinals weren’t staying clean enough between twice-daily scrubbings and dropped urinal cakes in every single one of them. It was Kurt’s second week as a student there, and they were walking to Warblers’ rehearsal when they passed the boys’ room and Blaine caught the first whiff.

The sharp naphthalene scent stabbed into the center of his brain.

It all came back then – the scrape of cold tile against his knees, the fingers gripping his shoulders and hair, the shoe pressing against his kidney, the twist-crush of asphyxiation in his lungs.

The next thing Blaine knew, he was out on the front lawn, bent over and heaving the contents of his lunch under the shrubbery.

“Blaine!” It took him a moment to understand that it was Kurt’s voice next to him, Kurt’s hands on his back and his hair – to understand that he was not in the first-floor boys’ room of his old school; his head was not being held in a mop bucket; and the thing entering his lungs was air, not water.

“Blaine, are you okay?”

Blaine tried to answer but the words wouldn’t come. And then he heaved again into the dirt.

Both of Kurt’s hands were on his back now, soothing. “Of course you’re not okay. You just threw up in the bushes. C’mon, let me take you to the nurse’s office.”

Blaine shook his head, his eyes closed, the wherewithal to be embarrassed suddenly entering his conscience. “No. No, I just – I’ll be okay.”

Kurt’s palm pressed against his forehead, its warmth pulling Blaine further into the present. “You’re freezing, though.”

“I always get cold when I throw up. I’ll be fine. I’m sorry, this is totally gross, isn’t it?”

“It’s fine,” Kurt said, handing him a tissue. “Everyone gets sick at some point. I’ll walk you to your room, okay? And then let me bring you some chamomile tea?”

“Don’t you need to head home?”

Kurt shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere until I’m sure you’re okay. You'd do the same for me.”

That night, Blaine tried to think of ways to explain to Kurt what had happened. But every time his brain started to put the words together, he was back in the first-floor boys’ room of his old school, drowning in a mop bucket.

_“You’ve already told the police everything they need to know. You don’t have to talk about the details of what happened anymore unless you think it will help,” his therapist had told him at their second meeting after the Sadie Hawkins dance. “Not with me or anybody.”_

_“But isn’t talking supposed to make everything better?”_

_She shook her head. “It can. But not if it makes you feel like you’re going through the same thing over and over again.”_

When Blaine saw Kurt the next morning, he said he must have eaten something at lunch that disagreed with him. That afternoon, he went to the headmaster and expressed a concern that the urinal cakes might trigger Trent’s asthma. They were gone the next day.

At his therapy appointment that Friday, he worked on breathing exercises for the next time he smelled naphthalene.

*

“Why don’t you ever let your hair go natural?” Kurt said the morning after the party at Rachel’s, glancing at Blaine’s reflection in his vanity mirror. “It looks nice.”

Blaine patted the top of his head. His curls had gone loose and long in the night, the way he used to wear them all the time.

He’d been proud of his curls – the way they snaked seductively around his face, the way it felt to run his fingers through them. Sometimes he’d stroke his hair and imagine that his hands belonged to another boy. It made him feel beautiful.

And then came the Sadie Hawkins dance. He’d put curl-defining lotion in his hair that night so it would fall in ringlets. His friend Evan had loved it, said Blaine looked as lovely as Narcissus.

But those three boys had loved it, too. They twisted their fingers so deep into it that there was no getting free. They took turns pulling him into the bathroom by it, held him under the water by it, pulled at it so he couldn’t look away as they kicked Evan again and again and Evan vomited blood onto their shoes.

“Earth to Blaine, come in Blaine.” Kurt’s voice pulled him back toward the present moment. He looked up. Kurt was standing beside the bed, a concerned look on his face and a glass of green liquid in his hand. The blue of his eyes pierced through the cloud of memories. “You’re more hungover than I thought. Have some Gatorade.”

Blaine took the glass from Kurt and gulped it down. “Thanks.”

Later, when Kurt was down in the kitchen helping his dad put the finishing touches on breakfast, Blaine looked at his wild hair in the vanity mirror and tried to imagine Kurt’s fingers in it. He tried to remember the feeling of warmth in his chest he used to get imagining a beloved boy’s hands on his scalp.

His whole body went cold.

He opened Kurt’s barely used bottle of Bed Head Power Trip hair gel and plastered his curls flat against his skull.

When they started dating and would kiss for long, delicious hours and Kurt’s hands would begin to slide up from their solid perch around the back of Blaine’s neck toward his hair, he always found a way to divert them. Sometimes he’d grab them both and bring them to his mouth and kiss Kurt’s knuckles until Kurt bent over giggling; sometimes he’d coax them toward his chest or face, letting the weight of Kurt’s fingers ground him back into his body.

“Why won’t you let me touch your hair?” Kurt asked a week into their first summer together. Kurt knew about Sadie Hawkins by now -- the fact of it, if not its depth. Blaine could have begun to share the details. He could have told him that the touch of those boys had burned into his scalp and not even Kurt could erase it.

But Kurt was looking at him with that coy, flirtatious smile, and Blaine wanted to go back to kissing him. Words would bring Sadie Hawkins into the present, where it didn’t belong.

So he answered, “Because I’m incredibly vain,” and Kurt’s eyes crinkled with laughter and he was so, so beautiful and Blaine’s heart started flying and this feeling – this feeling is what those boys at Sadie Hawkins had wanted to steal from Blaine. He wasn’t going to let them. He wasn’t going to ruin this moment by talking about memories that don’t belong here.

He kissed Kurt and Kurt kissed him back, cupping his jaw gently, and everything was softness and light and homecoming, and the awful malice of that sickening night couldn’t touch them.

*

Blaine thought that nothing could hurt as much as the memory of that Sadie Hawkins dance. But then he betrayed Kurt, and that hurt more.

Maybe that was why, when Tina demanded that McKinley have a Sadie Hawkins dance, he didn’t break out in a cold sweat. Maybe that’s why, even though he couldn’t bring himself to answer ‘yes’ the first time she asked him to go with her, he _could_ the second time.

Or maybe it was simply because she was a girl, and it was a different time of year, and McKinley was a different school.

Maybe it was because he’d learned in the time since his last Sadie Hawkins dance how to hit hard enough to rupture someone’s kidney.

*

Blaine did talk about it once. It was in the ER the night that it happened, when the police showed up. “I’m sorry,” the officer said. “I’m going to ask you some questions and I need you to answer me as best as you can, even when it’s hard to talk about.”

He managed, somehow, to remain calm through the whole interview. When things got hard, he’d stop and reach for the little paper cup of ginger ale the nurse had left for him. He’d sip at it and take a deep breath – _oh, he could breathe, it was such an odd feeling, would it always feel odd from now on? --_ and continue. When he was done with the ginger ale, he tore pieces off the cup to focus his nerves as he spoke.

By the time the interview was over, he’d transformed the cup into a pile of white confetti.

He wished he could tear the bodies of his assailants into pieces that small.

The thought made him smile.

*

That police interview was the last time he could think through the whole incident clearly. Later, when he would try to replay what happened that night, the details were jumbled. They only ever came to him in moments when he wasn't expecting them – not just with mothballs and urinal cakes and uninvited pats on the head, but also when water sloshed or toilets flushed or he heard the faint whirring of a blowdryer.

Then, the memories would become as vivid as if he were living them in the moment. His heart raced and his palms sweated and he had to remind himself to breathe – that it was safe to breathe, that there was plenty of air around him, there for the taking. He could see the shortest of the three attackers standing above him, whacking at the handdryer over and over again to keep it on a continuous blast to muffle the sounds of his and Evan’s sobs.

The memories also came to him in his sleep, on nights he should have been dreaming about beautiful things. They invaded his dreams the night the Warblers tied with the New Directions at sectionals, and the night of his first kiss with Kurt, and again after he and Kurt exchanged their first 'I love you's.

He’d wake himself up in his room at Dalton, shouting obscenities into the dark, the laughter of his tormentors filling his ears.

At some point, as his eyes adjusted to being open and he began to recognize the outlines of his desk and dresser and his roommate’s bed in the dark, his ears would adjust, too, and he would recognize the laughter as his roommate’s. "Blaine Anderson, go wash out your mouth," he would chuckle, and Blaine would force himself to chuckle, too, even though he could hardly breathe.

He slept a lot more soundly when Kurt was around. Before they started dating, they’d lie toe-to-head next to each other on Blaine’s bed as they read their English assignments, and Blaine would feel so safe that he’d fall asleep with his head leaning against the curve of Kurt’s instep. Later, when they became more intimate, it never felt complete without sleeping afterward – even if only for a few minutes.

Blaine was always safe in Kurt’s arms. The dreams never attacked him there.

Until, a few weeks after Blaine moved to New York, they did.

_Evan is on the floor and blood is everywhere and Blaine keeps screaming but no sound comes out, and he’s under water again, and he can’t breathe – he can’t breathe and he can’t move, their arms are wrapped around his body and their weight is on the back of his knees and there’s this growing pressure against his diaphragm, and he tries to twist himself free, if he could only move he would crack every one of their skulls open against the tile floor, but he can’t even breathe and he’s going to vomit and everything smells like naphthalene and urine and mud and Blaine’s drowning and Evan is gasping for air but blood keeps coming out of his mouth and the water that Blaine is drowing in isn’t water, it’s blood, and goddammit he’s going to kill every one of these motherfuckers, he has to, they’re going to pay for this, they’re going to –_

Blaine woke up just as his fist made contact with Kurt's shoulder.

"What the fuck?" Kurt’s voice was groggy, more confused than angry, drifting somewhere in the confusing space between wakefulness and sleep.

Blaine was not in that confusing space. He was wide awake, sitting straight up in bed, his pulse pounding in his ears and his body shaking with rage and his heart trying to catapult out of his ribcage. His lungs were moving too fast, gulping air because there wasn’t enough of it – there wasn't enough in his dream and there wasn't enough that night and there wasn’t enough now.

"Oh my god Kurt, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I’m so ..."

Kurt must have murmured _shhh_ at least a dozen times before Blaine finally stopped apologizing. When he did, he realized that Kurt’s hands were on his shoulders, rubbing small circles into the spasming muscles.

"Blaine, sweetie, what's going on?"

Blaine couldn’t quite see Kurt's face in the dark, but his voice was gentle and comforting and so close. The blood and water receded from Blaine’s lungs.

"I have these nightmares sometimes about Sadie Hawkins. The first one. _My_ first one. I'm so sorry."

"I'm okay. I was more freaked out about you. You were shouting and …" Kurt shrugged against the dark. "You sounded really scared."

"I was."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Blaine shakes his head. "No. Talking about it makes it hurt more."

“I know what you mean.” Kurt said, rubbing Blaine’s arm. “Let me hold you?”

“Yes.” Blaine leaned his cheek against Kurt’s shoulder and breathed him in. “That always helps.”

Kurt wrapped his arms around Blaine’s back and held him close and when Blaine started sobbing, he didn’t ask questions. He just kissed Blaine’s forehead and whispered, “You’re okay.”

Words make things more real.

“You’re okay,” Kurt said again, and Blaine knew he would be.

*


End file.
